“Do you beverage?” she asked me, and I said yes because I wanted her to think I was cool.

Six beers later I was tipsy, a bit off my game, so I admitted to her the only reason I said yes, and she didn’t laugh as I thought she might. Instead she took my keys and left me there.

It was cheap beer too. If you’re going to strike out with a girl, shouldn’t it at least be because of the good stuff? It didn’t really matter though. I was stuck at a club with no keys, a cheap beer buzz, and not much game. Just another Friday night.

I sat two stools down from the end of the bar, those kind of vinyl stools that look a bit like linoleum if you don’t look too closely. The club was called, appropriately enough, Vinyl, but the name was for the authentic DJ booth in the far corner, not for the hideous stools. It of course didn’t really matter. Before too long the club would go the way of the dinosaurs, like most clubs in Manhattan did.

Luckily I lived two blocks away, in a tiny walk-up squeezed between an all night pharmacy and a pawn shop that specialized in “The Best Prices For Your Gold!” So the issue of having no keys wasn’t really an issue when it came to driving. Unfortunately for me, getting into my apartment would be a bit of a problem, but one that I would gladly deal with in a few hours.

“I’ll have another,” I told Ray, the tattooed guy behind the bar, who seemed not to hear me, but only moments later a cold mug of Pabst Blue Ribbon slid into my hand.

I slapped a $10 on the bar and scanned the dance floor for another girl, any girl, or at least one who wouldn’t take my keys and leave me homeless. There were exactly two valid candidates who were ironically grinding on some douchy looking guys in the center of the parquet floor. I looked away. Maybe later they would pry themselves free from the attached appendages of those losers.

In the DJ booth an Asian guy in a backwards cap spun records like a pro, sliding effortlessly from old school to new school to everything in between, and I was impressed. Of course in a couple of months he would go the way of most DJ’s in New York — to the clubs in Jersey. It was a revolving door, and I’d seen way too many come and go just at the clubs uptown. I couldn’t even imagine how many moved through the seedier establishments in Brooklyn in the same amount of time.

Two more beers disappeared down my throat, warming my belly and fuzzing my brain even further. Odds were that Kelly was waiting for me back at my place. I think I told her where I lived anyway. She had seemed up for anything when she’d first posed the question, and maybe I was wasting my time hanging around a curiously retro club when I might have been looking at a sure thing if I just walked the couple of blocks.

Or, on the other hand, she could have been robbing me blind at that exact moment. She and a couple of burly friends of hers could be carting off my 52 inch TV right then, along with my collection of signed Yankees baseballs, and my shower curtain. Why my shower curtain? Why not? I had seen robbers take some crazy stuff before, and I wouldn’t put it past them to leave me vulnerable in that way as well.

I had just talked myself into heading back home to either get laid or to file a police report when a warm body slid onto the stool beside me, all perfumed and sweaty. The sickly sweet smells clashed in a comfortable way as I turned to take in the new scenery, a world of possibility that I hadn’t known existed even a moment before, but one that I was ready to take full advantage of… in the moment.